When I do my category roundups and reviews, my remits are always to be as broad as possible within the set criteria, and I typically include one or two older and discontinued models alongside the usual suspects and new releases. It is always with some degree of sadness that I witness pedal builders going out of business for one reason or another. This industry seems to have a fairly high burnout rate and with competition getting ever fiercer, it is unfortunately understandable that some ...

As I assumed per my first couple of recce’s - Spain was going to be a tricky territory to cover/feature compared to all the others that came before it - Britain, Canada, France, Germany, Italy and Greece. None of the current Spanish builders have yet attained wholly global recognition as of the moment - unlike a number of brands from the other featured countries.

Probably the most significant Spanish builder to-date has been Roberto García and his ThunderTomate brand - ...

Now definitively defined as a Pedal-format Modular Synthesizer, Sequencer and Multi-Effects unit. The control interface consists of a small OLED screen accompanied by a grid of 40 (5x8) 7-coloured LED backlit soft-touch buttons, 4 further control buttons for Secondary Functions, and a large Menu scroll dial. There are 3 footswitches to activate live playback and scroll through presets.

Essentially you have a building-block interface-led hybrid-modular-synthesiser where you chain ...

Everyone on this site should know by now that I’m a huge Boss fan and that in my 250 or so strong pedal collection, Boss currently contributes the largest number or 16. There are always a few Boss pedals I have on my rolling wishlist, and while I only have 4 semi-permanent Boss fixtures in my pedal-chain right now - the Keeley Freak Fuzz modded Blues Driver, Alchemy Audio modded GE-7 and NS-2, and of course the Boss MD-500 - I frequently rotate in other Bosses into other slots of the ...

As stated elsewhere, I got back into guitar again in September 2016, and initially had decided to keep it simple with a great guitar and a cool modern modelling amp. Yet I soon found out that this was not delivering the goods for me and decided in November 2016 that I should pursue the pedal / stompbox route also known as ’pedal platform route’.

A very great number of YouTube videos I watched in those early days, as well as pedalboard pictures on Pinterest featured Strymon ...

This article completes the fourth part of the quadrilogy which started with the compact pedal overview and was triggered by the 40th anniversary Boss article. If you’re going to go with a large enclosure pedal, you really need it to be of the all-singing and dancing variety, otherwise why would you be sacrificing so much pedal real estate. Traditionally large pedals have meant the big all-in-one workstations - i.e. your classic big box Eventide and Strymon, and now Boss solutions. ...

We’ve covered off Key Effects Pedals per Compact and Mini size, and here we go up a category to Medium. When I think of medium-sized pedals, the makers that immediately spring to mind are Strymon, Empress , Carl Martin and Way Huge (Dunlop) - for whom the medium-size enclosure forms the mainstay of their product offerings. All the newer Orange Amps pedals have been of medium size and same goes for Stone Deaf FX, and I guess in the early 70’s - before Boss came along with its ’...

It’s no secret that I’m a fan of mini pedals and feature right now 6 of that type in my active studio pedal chain (of 35). All of these are exceptional at what they provide, and they all sound great, and are amongst my favourites. Somewhat ironically, of those 6 - one has already been marked for replacement. My much-loved Mooer Blues Mood which is a clone of the celebrated Keeley-modded Boss Blues Driver BD-2 - has somewhat added competition in the guise of the new Boss Angry Driver...

Following my piece on 20 of the Best Boss Compact Pedals, I decided to do an overview of 20 of the key different pedal types by approximate pedalboard sort order - to see which brands in my opinion fared the best across all 20 categories - in terms of preferred compact pedal per type. This is of course all hugely subjective, but there are several practicality concerns here too, and some pedals perhaps that would be selected almost regardless of any size restrictions. In every slot you have ...

Like many players, even though I have an Expression/Volume pedal, I don’t tend to use it much. I specifically bought the DigiTech Whammy Ricochet back in the day - as it makes use of a footswitch in place of a rocker, and I really like the TC Electronic ’MASH’ technology which embeds pressure-sensitive sensors into a footswitch to very much make that work like a rocker too. The only downside being with a Wah pedal, where you might wish to have the pedal in half-cocked mode - ...